Desegregation in Orlando took nonviolent path, as play depicts

August 10, 2007|By Joy Wallace Dickinson, Sentinel Staff Writer

In Orlando in the early '60s, some high-school students had more on their minds than sock hops and school exams.

For teens such as Sylvester Mack, a Jones High senior in 1962 who joined civil-rights sit-ins, "the issue was, what are you going to do if you are arrested? . . . What are you going to do if you get attacked?"

Although largely unreported at the time, black students actively followed Orlando minister the Rev. Canon Nelson W. Pinder along the path of nonviolent resistance to segregation.

Their story inspired the play Pinder's Kids, by Orlando playwright and actor Barry G. White. It debuts today at the Orange County Regional History Center, in a production by the People's Theatre company.

The issues that concerned Mack back in 1962 have been brought into focus for the teens in the cast.

"This play has helped me so much," said Krista King, 13, who is the drum major at Memorial Middle School. "It's a great chance for everyone to open up their minds. I hope everybody will learn something about the civil-rights movement."

A rough landing

In 1959 Pinder, now 75, arrived in Orlando fresh from a seminary in Wisconsin to become the priest at St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church. He was 27 years old.

Right after his plane landed at the airport, "I had a fight on my hands," at least metaphorically, he said this week.

When Pinder tried to get in the airport limousine, the driver said he had to call the "colored" taxi. When he tried to get a cup of coffee while he waited for the cab, the airport coffee shop wouldn't serve him.

"That's when I realized my work was going to be cut out for me," he said.

Soon Pinder's work included tutoring black teens in tactics that chipped away at the walls of segregation.

Others also offered leadership, but Pinder "was the key person involved as far as the youth were concerned," Mack recalled.

"You just don't hear that much about those kinds of protests happening in Orlando in the 1960s, but they did, thanks to Father Pinder and other community leaders," said historian Ben Brotemarkle.

In White's play, set in 1962, Bruce Jarman of Orlando plays Pinder; the other characters are fictional, although inspired by real participants, some of whose memories are recorded in oral-history interviews.

Mack's recollections include serious dinner-table talks with his parents about the strictures of segregation. He recalls being devastated by reports of the lynching in Mississippi of 14-year-old Emmett Till, widely publicized by photos in Jet magazine.

"I was trying to fathom that kind of hate, that somebody could do that to another human being, to a kid," Mack recalled.

When he and other young people staged sit-ins at the downtown dime stores -- Kress, McCrory's, Woolworth -- they encountered anger and verbal abuse but no blows.

Even so, "remembering the hate and the resentment and the scorn is absolutely indelible," Mack says; "those things don't go away overnight."

The closest Mack remembers coming to violence was a trip to Ronnie's Restaurant with a group of white and black teens from First Unitarian Church of Orlando. The car in which he was riding was attacked by white teens who called out racial slurs and tried to roll the car over.

At an earlier sit-in at the Woolworth downtown, the white waitresses and manager kept putting up "closed" signs when the black teens took seats at the lunch counter.

"The next time we went, when we showed up, they unscrewed the tops of the stools" at the lunch counter, "and they refused to serve us," he recalls.

Path to peaceful change

Pinder credits black and white Orlandoans with avoiding the violence that erupted in other Southern towns.

A car once tried to run him down as he stepped from a downtown curb, he said. The men in the car yelled "KKK" as they passed.

Now, years later, playwright White hopes his work will tell today's youth about Pinder's courage, about the roots of the hatred he confronted and about how his "kids" opened the door to opportunities they experience today.

"We were just like any other U.S. city or town -- you didn't read about it or hear about it, but we had the same problems," White said.

Jarman, who plays Pinder, said he grew up in the priest's neighborhood and has known him since childhood.

"I grew up knowing him and yet not knowing him," Jarman said. "I knew he was well-respected, but I didn't know why he was well-respected."